We also ran into some stress-filled moments during the early part of the band's career, when its U.K. and U.S. record companies weren't exactly seeing eye-to-eye on what the albums should look like. We pretty much stuck with the Stones' U.K. catalog, since that's where they got their start, but you'll see we steered outside of those parameters a few times to make room for some of their greatest songs.

One of the things that emerges from all this was just how strong Mick Jagger and Keith Richards were as songwriters almost as soon as they put pen to paper. Only two of the nearly two dozen tracks below are covers: The first is a song the Stones all but owned as soon as they played it; the other comes from their 2016 all-covers blues album, so there was really no way around that one.

Thing is with a band like the Rolling Stones, there's literally dozens of great songs that could have easily ended up as the best song on each of their albums – if only the ones you'll see below didn't get in the way.